Oh, I get it....he’s so smart that nobody can see all the good he’s doing because he’s doing it in such a brilliant way that nobody can tell that he’s doing something good because we can’t see the man behind the curtain and in due time all will become clear and everything will be good and we’ll all be rich and happy and there will be total peace. Or something.

12
posted on 07/07/2009 12:50:16 PM PDT
by clintonh8r
(General James Mattoon Scott: Where are you now that we need you?!)

Whenever I read something by Kissinger there’s some stuff that strikes me as ‘correct’, some stuff with which I disagree, and a whole lotta gobbletygook.

What the heck he meant by Germany being ‘relatively stronger’ after WW1 than before it? Whahht? By almost any metric Imperial Germany was stronger than Weimar or Nazi Germany. The army was larger. It’s Navy was MUCH bigger and more balanced. It was industrially stronger, and with greater access to natural resources (much of which were now over the border in Poland). Plus they had no oil in a world that was shifting away from coal and toward petroleum — a major strategic weakness.

If Kissinger is making a straight comparison of Imperial Germany (plus the Central Powers) vs. the Entente AND Nazi Germany (plus the Axis) vs. the Allies he’s being an idiot. WW1 became a free-for-all at the outset. WW2 had a long period of Germany (and the Soviets) picking off weaker countries. If a general war had not broken out by some miracle, you could almost view the wars as sequential. Rheinland (remilitarization), Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia (the rest of it), Austria (Anschluss) all happened before Poland. The Soviet Union took Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and attacked Finland. I think the Russians also took a slice off Romania during this period.

Fact is, Hitler was doing it this way precisely because Nazi Germany was strategically weak relative to the Western Allies. If England & France had mustered the courage in 1936, or even 1938, they could have strangled Germany before it got on a roll.

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